Roaming traffic contributes a significant percentage of an operator's revenue and even a better percentage of the operator's margin. With increasing competition and regulatory control, operators are being more pressured to increase their roaming revenue and reduce roaming margin losses. They need keep a check on roaming quality and fraud control at both, own networks to serve inbound roamers and roaming partner networks to serve outbound roamers, that can directly impact an operator's roaming revenue and margin.
CAMEL is an Intelligent Network (IN) based standard that has a framework to help a network operator to provide the subscribers with the operator specific services even when roaming outside the home network. The primary use of CAMEL is prepaid (outbound) roaming. Unlike a USSD based prepaid roaming solution which is call-back based, CAMEL based prepaid roaming provides a seamless user experience just like normal mobile originated activities (calls, SMS etc). Since signaling control of an outbound roamer's call is passed by the VPMN gsmSSF to the HPMN gsmSCF, the gsmSCF is able to deduce the prepaid roamer's balance appropriately.
Camel roaming is primarily used for prepaid outbound roaming. Camel roaming is also becoming more valuable for many advanced value services such as short code, fraud control, misdialed call correction, real-time billing, CLI delivery, home call routing etc for outbound roamers. Unlike a USSD based prepaid roaming solution which is call-back based, CAMEL based prepaid roaming provides a seamless user experience just like normal mobile originated activities (calls, SMS etc). Since signaling control of an outbound roamer's call is passed by the VPMN gsmSSF to the HPMN gsmSCF, the gsmSCF can properly deduce the prepaid roamer's balance.
Another use of CAMEL is to enable Virtual Home Environment (VHE). Some implementation of VHE services can be like outbound roamers' calls based on home dialing experience (e.g. calls without country codes or home international access prefix, short code calls etc) can be correctly translated to the ones corresponding to the visitor network environment to complete the calls to provide a home-like user experience.
CAMEL is also useful for real-time billing. TAP records between roaming partners can come in as late as a month. Since it is just a wholesale Inter Operator Tariff (IOT) from the TAP exchange that doesn't affect retail IOT, the HPMN can produce retail billing in real-time. CAMEL can be used as well to implement fraud control measures. Operator Determined Barring (ODB) works well on all calls or international call barring while roaming at a VPMN but not well on premium numbers barring at the VPMN since these numbers can change dynamically. By using CAMEL control on an outbound roamer, all the roamer's calls can be restricted according to HPMN application logic.
Other services like selective home routing, least cost routing or CLI delivery or third party partner carrier routing from an outbound roamer can also be implemented using the CAMEL capabilities. In this case, an outbound roamer's call can be selectively routed back to the home network or a partner network based on the called number and the calling network. The selection logic employed by the HPMN gsmSCF can be based on least cost routing or just quality service control (e.g. roaming quality monitoring or for better delivery of caller ID via home or partner network) or lawful interception at home or just simply collect termination charges at home without incurring extra charges to the roamer.
Although there are many camel relationships around, there are still many relationships that are non-established. This is primarily attributed to the high cost of resources involved in conducting Camel roaming tests. Also, another reason is that there is a significant mismatch of CAMEL phases and various non-standard CAMEL related implementations by different operators, thus making the agreements difficult to carry out. For example, some VPMN may have only Camel phase 1 support for inbound camel roaming, while HPMN's prepaid roaming supports Camel phase 2 only. Some HPMNs only supports Camel Phase 1 for outbound roaming, while the VPMN may only support Camel 2 for inbound roaming. This creates major mismatches between CAMEL phases of different operators.
In accordance with the foregoing, there is a need in the art of a system, a method, and a computer product for facilitating roaming of inbound and outbound roamers of an operator, by providing various CAMEL adaptations between the networks. The solution may be deployed for one single operator or in a central manner for multiple operators. When solution is used for multiple operators, the deployment can be hub based, where each of these operators can be considered as a club member.